I'm working at a school and need to put together a solution that allows our students to access certain flash-based websites on their iPads.
The existing commercial solutions like Puffin Browser don't work in our case since we need to ensure that our students traffic is going through our content-filtering system.
I currently have a XRDP setup on my server. My goal was to create a VNC or RDP server that only serves a web browser. I have it more or less working as intended – but what I am struggling with is that every time a user connects – if I use the sesman-x11rdp it kicks the other user off. If I use the sesman-vnc setting – it joins the already active connection.
What I am trying to accomplish is that a single user could have multiple number of vnc or rdp connections that are independent from each other.
Meaning – if I remote in from my phone and my ipad at the same time as the same user – I would get a separate session for each.
Anyone have any suggestions?
Best Answer
Your problem is an interesting one, and your solution path isn't wholly wrong, but I think you're chasing a more complicated solution than you need.
If you have a unix server you don't need VNC or RDP - you already have X11.
With an app like iSSH you can display any X client on an iPhone/iPad, so a simple solution is to give each iDevice an installation of iSSH with a passwordless key that logs it into a student account. Have that student account launch the browser of your choice and you should be all set.
This will wind up costing you at least $10 per iPad for the iSSH software (I'm not aware of any other X servers for the iPad - there very well may be some though).
If you're a Windows shop, RDP is the answer.
Something similar to the above can be rigged up with RDP and a Windows server (each student logs in to their normal account via RDP, and has access to whatever software they'd normally be able to use - including browsers - subject to their normal restrictions.
You would probably need to purchase CALs for each student that would be simultaneously connected to the server for this to be legal, but as an educational institution Microsoft will probably cut you a deal on licensing that makes this a reasonable option.
You would need to contact your Microsoft representative to work that end of it out.